Can anyone build a credential?
Yes, building credentials is something everybody can do. You can make your own credential. But if you are just printing something out and saying “Here, this is a credential”, you might find that people don’t want to give you money for it or trust it. It would be nice to use a credential that is already there, a certain credential type. These things are called CTypes, or credential types. Anybody can build them, they are basically a data structure representing what is inside the credential.
So, for example, a driving license would normally include a photo, it would include your name, and a vehicle class. And a gaming credential probably wouldn’t have a vehicle class, but it would have probably have your points balance, and maybe a store of different types of things that you have collected in the game, like a magic potion and so on. And so everybody would be able to build their own credential types.
But it can be foreseen that there will be credential types that are so useful that they will just be standardized and used by others. This is standardization from the bottom up – it is useful, so everybody uses it. This is basically how standardization normally works in the world.
In Europe, for example, you have this A4 paper size, and most of the European countries now have this format because it’s really practical. Because it fits into the printer, and it fits into the envelope. But if you go to the US, they don’t know about A4. They have the letter format. And so you have different types and different standards, but if you talk about A4 in Europe or letter format in the US they will know what size page you are talking about. Standards are agreed on. And this is the same thing that will also happen with credential types over time.